Learn to Live Without
by Aesla
Summary: Regina lacks and lives without, but she still lives. As long as she can.


_Just a short drabble-turned-one-shot of Swan/Mills family angst with obligatory SwanQueen sadness. Rambly and unbetaed and gone off-canon at the end of season three. Character death. Inspired by the song 'Learn to Live Without' from If/Then.  
_

* * *

Regina takes her coffee black at the reception. The gathering is lovely, and the grief seems to quell comment on the obvious expense. Table cloths and silver finery reflect the tears of the bereaved, and Snow and Charming graciously field the influx of guests while Emma sits mutely, unseeing, on the chaise in the Mifflin mansion. The Sheriff drinks her whiskey neat while baby Neal fusses in the other room. No one can quite muster the strength it takes to go to him; these people learn early to self-soothe.

Henry had been dressed in the suit Regina had selected for his first dance. Junior high. He was nervous about asking Paige.

"You will request her hand like a gentleman," Regina had said. "And you shall dress like a gentleman."

"As long as you don't make me a grandmother any time soon, kid," Emma had quipped. "God knows we've got too many generations that could pass for less than forty in this family."

"Miss Swan."

That had transpired three weeks ago. Before Zelena. Before the curse gone wrong. Before baby Neal's birth, kidnapping, his rescue, and before Zelena had exacted her final revenge.

"I may not live to see it," her verdigris was translucent and sharp, and dripped like candlewax as she cast her final spell. "But I will destroy your happiness."

And she had.

They buried Henry next to his father two hours ago.

* * *

Regina takes cold showers now. Feeling is lost, has been, since she buried her heart along with Henry. Snow had stopped her, the first time in the Enchanted Forest. The renegade bandit, second chance mother, couldn't find it in herself to reprimand Regina this time.

Regina sleeps standing, her feet tired but moving, because settling only leads to thoughts, and thoughts to desperation.

She sends her laundry out to the dry cleaners instead of ironing her specific pleats into the legs of her prim navy suits. There is no longer joy in presentation.

Regina doesn't cook anymore. She has no reason to, so she orders in for one, if she eats at all. Without Henry to worry over, her healthy habits have fallen by the wayside.

She and Emma commiserate over cider and wine, a Pinot from 2003 she had been saving for a special occasion. The blonde woman is her only solace, and how fitting.

_How fitting._

They sleep together once when they are drunk and sad, a week after the funeral. And love making had never been melancholic before, but both are tinged with a faint sense of lack despite coming together on luxurious sheets in a Maine mansion. Because this could have been something more precious had Henry still been with them. Something precious and cherished that could have led to family. It's not aggressive, not flirtatious, and not challenging, as it should have been. It's not teasing, or stubborn, as Emma Swan so frequently is. It simply happens, because they are two depressed people and Robin has a wife and Hook hasn't the skill to handle emotional sensitivities to such a degree. Emma doesn't sleep in her bed afterwards, and Regina finds her at staring at the stars on Henry's ceiling, crying over his pillow as she had years before.

It sickens her when once it would have entertained her.

Regina does cook the morning after, but only out of obligation. She retains her manners, but does not temper her bluntness.

"This cannot happen again."

Money frees up in ways it hadn't when Henry was still alive. She's overwhelmed with the thought of how expensive children can be, how feet lengthen and clothes are outgrown by the month, how school supplies and video games and Christmas presents suddenly manifest themselves in extra funds she never needed, but has, nonetheless.

Time frees up as well. After two months, she realizes she's not stepped outside of her house other than to breach the doors to city hall, to her monochromatic office when she's never felt greyer. Regina works, and works well, stays late because there's no one to go home to, comes in early because school time car-pool is a thing of the past, and she ends up being nominated for a state award in local government for her extended efforts.

Even the citizens can't grumble about that.

Some of them even feel _sorry _for her.

She's taken to silencing her phone once she steps back inside her home. If it's that dire, they may reach her at her office. It's usually not dire. Snow calls to check up, and Emma just calls.

Regina ignores them both.

Regina takes long baths because she visits the stables, now. She goes to Henry's liveried horse and grooms him, and calls it amusement. She polishes tack with a worn rag and the skill returns to her easily, the leather supple as newborn skin, rougher than aged flesh. Straw smells different in this world, but the lingering scent of lost love remains the same.

Regina sleeps in an empty house. It frightens her and cripples her because love _is_ vulnerability.

She had always considered herself a decent mother, stricter than Snow, but certainly more suitable than Emma. Regina had insisted Henry perform his fair share of chores, to teach him responsibility, for him to earn his allowance. She takes out the garbage now, _her_, _a queen_, carrying disposed Styrofoam containers and plastic wrap and three-day old apple peels to the roadside. She washes her Mercedes in the warm weather and notices that the soapy streaks are harder to avoid than she thought; she suddenly feels anguished for reprimanding Henry over such a petty detail, and unprompted tears spring to her eyes. She doesn't dare let her neighbors see her mowing the lawn, but a quick arm flick and the grass regresses into sprouting sheaths instead of haphazard blades, and the mower rusts without Henry's touch in the garden shed out back.

She silences every ticking clock in the house because the seconds are more painful than the electric torture she once endured at the docks.

Regina shouts silently during town hall meetings and internally rails against the imbeciles who continue to live when her son is _dead_, and she takes pointed care not to allow her gaze to drift toward the Sheriff's chair. Because she knows that Emma Swan is speaking calmly but her heart is screaming just as loud as Regina's.

Four months later she finds a jacket Henry left rumpled in the hall closet. She had given away most of his clothes, boxed away most of his treasures, and hidden away his storybook in her own personal library. She pulls it out on the worst night and berates herself for what she was, what she is. And the narrative detaches her and pulls her close, and she hears Henry read it to her. But his voice is garbled and deeper than it should be, because it was on the verge of changing when she got him back. And then when she lost him again.

She knows, then, that she can't really remember what he sounds like.

Regina can't look at baby Neal. He doesn't look like Henry, not really, but his expressions are too similar. There's Snow and David and the baby and their lives lived and she can't remember what vengeance and vendetta tastes like anymore. It's bland and at least with Henry, her hate had reason, had substance. There is nothing she pushes for any longer, because getting over _one more thing_ in her life is utterly impossible.

It is more telling, however, that she cannot look at Emma.

Emma smiles the way Henry did. Their noses crinkle and their nostrils flair and the soft patch of skin below their chins twitch with mirth. And Emma smiles with Hook and hangs off of his arm as if she hadn't shared loss with Regina once upon a time, as if she hadn't shared her bed or her sorrows. Regina doesn't resent her for her happiness, but she can resent her smiles.

Those were Henry's smiles. And it's not fair that Emma gets to outlive their son and smile with life when Henry can't.

It's been eight months.

Regina allows herself quiet wins; a little girl who knows no better, only that the mayor has orchestrated an elaborate town Harvest festival, wraps herself around Regina's legs after she wins an apple-bobbing contest. And her mother and father dash up and apologize and Regina instills the fear of God within them with naught but a look. She shares a secret smile with the child that they whisk away in their arms, waving while the parents retreat hastily, but the girl grins back at her all the same.

She gifts baby Neal with saved money for a college education on his first birthday.

Snow is beside herself, and even David can't conjure any charming words of gratitude. Regina ends unnecessary praise with a perfunctory, "It's not like Henry needs it anymore."

Emma eyes her coldly, then follows her back to her home after the party. She shouts at her. She hugs her. They visit Henry. There are the obligatory flowers, and Regina sets foot in her mausoleum, because she finds comfort in grey stone, unwavering and steady, heavier than human life.

Emma screams at her again and nearly punches her again but doesn't. She kisses her instead and Regina can't respond because her heart is encased in one of those tiny drawers in her stone mausoleum. The days are deadly, just like her love. And they fade into years when Emma leaves her, just like Henry left her.

She stands alone, stoutly, and loves the dark. She loves the doubt, too, the uncertainties of the could-have's. It fluctuates daily between hope and despair, when what-might-be's change to might-have-been's.

_Might have driven Henry to his first dance._

_Might have dated, and liked, and loved his birth mother._

_Might have sent him to college._

_Might have ridden horses with my son. _

_Might have saved him in ways I couldn't save myself._

She holds what little life she still possesses within herself and dares not let it out. Emma leaves town or left town a while ago but Regina can't remember; she sees her enough on holidays but knows the blonde no longer resides in Storybrooke. And that's just fine. Madam Mayor files paperwork for years and baby Neal is suddenly in kindergarten. Marian is pregnant and Roland will have a younger sibling. Belle had twins and if Regina's honest, she likes them better than baby Neal. They're headstrong and already possess the aptitude for magic, and she wishes hell on Rumple for it. There are so many _children_, so many relations she once had and still has but doesn't, not really, not without the glue of the truest believer to hold her together.

And that's what it means to be the most resilient. She doesn't let go. She loves too deeply, feels, _too deeply_, as Snow had said ages ago. It took decades with Daniel. It would likely take centuries with Henry.

And so she thinks, on year three, month eight, week two and day four, that she'd rather not spend centuries merely standing, merely bearing her own resiliency. She learned what it was to live without and decided she couldn't stomach the lesson. She can, however, stomach the fatal draft that she prepared within her mausoleum, that she drank in front of Henry's weathered headstone.

Emma takes her coffee black at the reception.

* * *

_Feedback appreciated. _


End file.
